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An anonymous reader writes "I have been with my company for 10+ years and have seen many development cycles on our projects. We have a developer intern who has not been on the team for very long. On day one he started ripping into my code on how terrible it is. We have a code base of roughly 50,000 lines of code. When he comes to me with a complaint about the code it is simply because he does not have the experience with it to actually understand what the code is doing. He is a smart guy with lots of promise, he is asking good questions, but how do I get him to look past his own self perceived greatness enough to slow down and learn what we are doing and how we have pulled it off?"

Have him comment the code base. All code is sorely lacking in documentation and commentary.

When the comments are part of the docs (like doxygen), then it will matter if the document doesn't read correctly as to what function does what and it will be apparent if he understands what occurs. If he does a good job writing it up, then invite him to be part of a harder problem.

Just prove him wrong. Ask him why he thinks your code is so bad. Maybe he's right, probably not though, and his argument will fall apart once you show him how your code works and why you did it the way you did. Be patient so long as he is reasonable and maybe you'll both learn something.